Keith Reddin's dark comedy "Life During Wartime" has everything its title suggests: love, fighting, innocence and corruption.
Tommy (Brandon Weaver) is an up-and-coming home-security salesman who uses fear as a sales pitch. He falls in love with his first sale, a single mother named Gale (Rachael Shapiro). Gale, the mother of 16-year-old Howard (James Blessing), is much older than the young, wide-eyed Tommy, but she becomes smitten with him, too.
Heinrich (Andrew Pollock) is Tommy's corrupt but smooth-talking white-collar boss. Along with Sally (Becka Ross), he teaches Tommy to show his clients the potential danger lurking in everyday American life.
"Let's be realistic," the greasy-haired Heinrich says. "It's a dangerous world."
Tommy is the innocent hero, as charming as he is vulnerable. He is shocked to discover the rotten world around him as he becomes tangled in his boss's scheme. The company sends burglars to break into people's houses, so the neighborhood fear factor and home-security sales increase exponentially. Tommy is against the plan but doesn't stop it, and later pays a personal price for looking the other way.
John Calvin, cleverly played by Michael Saxton, sits on the balcony and serves as a kind of narrator. The 16th-century Protestant theologian acutely observes the modern scenes unfolding below and occasionally wanders down to crash them. He offers his distaste for violence and obscenity in modern entertainment, ironically as the other characters voice profanity around him. It is funny and refreshing to hear Calvin speak like a film critic. He comments on the impossibility of life being like "Leave it to Beaver" and on the excessive violence in "Miami Vice" as freely as he does original sin and the fall of man.
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Director Kristen Loree said she chose the script because it was refreshing and original and would give her students an opportunity to shine.
"I thought it would be a good challenge for the students and appropriate for their development," she said. "It is strangely surreal, yet very real."
The play explores the gray areas between the black and white concepts of good and evil, predestination and free will, danger and safety. One of the peak moments in the play is when Gale finds failure in Calvin's logic and suggests that if people's choices help them to feel more fully alive, maybe they aren't so impure.
Calvin assures the audience the human world is only going to get much worse, but the satire is hopeful. Tommy realizes taking risks makes life worth living, no matter how other people view his choices.
Apart from grave discussions of sin, fear and danger in America's modern moral landscape, "Life During Wartime" also brings levity. It is hilarious in its
unpredictability. A frustrated waitress (Katy Bowen) blows up at the rude Heinrich. A beer-drinking, bare-chested suburban man (Alex Hetlinger) shows Tommy his own home-security system: a bag full of semi-automatic weapons. A strange man at a bar (James Blessing) launches into an entertaining monologue about a suppressed childhood memory.
The play also has its graceful moments. The interspersed chorus of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Shapiro and Bowen's a cappella version of E.E. Cummings' "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town" are lovely.
Reddin's logic can be a little hard to follow and can be taken in many different directions, but the constant action is stimulating and excellently performed. Loree's cast does shine, just as she expected.
Loree said she appreciates that the play fuels further questions for the audience.
"It's not yelling at you to think anything in particular - it just asks you to think," she said. "Hopefully, it will be the start of a good conversation."
"Life During Wartime"
Thursday-Saturday
7:30 p.m.
UNM Experimental Theatre
$10 general admission
$8 seniors and faculty
$7 students and staff
